Wednesday, August 16, 2017

I found some great old maps of the tramway system of Portland, Maine on a German Wikipedia page. Interestingly, there does not appear to be an English-language version of this page.

The city began a horse-drawn tramway in 1863. The image above highlights the tramways in yellow over a panoramic image from 1876. The details in this panorama are spectacular.

The map below shows the growth of the horse tram system from 1883 to 1896

The Portland and Forest Avenue Railroad Company was founded in 1860 and began operating a horse drawn carriage system. The first section ran between Spring Street and the Grand Trunk Railway Station (shown in the panorama detail) opened in October, 1863. The fare for the entire route was 5 cents. The following year two more lines were added. The red lines shown above represent the system by the end of 1864.

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Next time I visit Detroit the Guardian Building, an art deco "cathedral of finance" will be on my must see list. Not because it is a "timeless depiction of creativity and accomplishment" but because of the Michigan map mural. Just look at how it's situated! It's like the Cathedral of the Holy Map!

The map on its own does not show much - mainly colored counties and water bodies along with various figures and coats of arms. If you're a Michigan purist you will note that most of the Upper Peninsula is missing. Its more about how the map is displayed.

Wednesday, August 2, 2017

It's not about where to go to see the upcoming eclipse (August 21st, 2017) -it's where do you see the best maps that interests me. The Great American Eclipse site is a good starting point. They feature very detailed maps showing how much time the total eclipse will last.

Above is the area around Columbia, South Carolina where some friends of mine (and possibly me but that is unlikely at this point) are gathering. I'm not sure why they want to drive 30 miles to get an additional 10 seconds of eclipse time but maybe it's better watching it over Lake Murray. Hopefully they get a sunny day-chances are much better of that in Nebraska or Wyoming.

This site features maps of the nation, for each state, drive time maps, videos of the path, lots of highly detailed maps like above and statistics. You can also buy "Occupy Totality" T-shirts. I like their logo too.

You can see where future eclipses will be from Scientific American. Their interactive graphic works nicely for small countries...

...but gets unwieldy for larger ones.

There are probably many other good graphics. You can look up at the sky or look online for more maps. If you are in the USA and you miss this one, there will be another one in seven years. Click the picture for more details.

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

50 years ago one of the largest riots in US History took place in Detroit. The following year geographer William Bunge began an innovative project, the Detroit Geographical Expedition. People from underprivileged neighborhoods were taught to use mapping as a tool to highlight racial inequities. These untrained mappers created some excellent maps showing the plight of their neighborhoods. I plan to show more of these in a future post, but for now here are some maps of the 1967 riot.

The report that includes these maps can be seen here - this is a large file that may be slow to download.

July 25, 1967*, 7:30 AM

The riot stemmed from a raid at an after hours bar called the Blind Pig (top of the map) on 12th Street (now Rosa Parks Boulevard). The next map shows the spread of the riot between 7:30 and 9:30...

... and then at 9:45 AM.

Here is a map of fire damage across the city.

The 12th Street Riot area is the dense cluster north of Grand Boulevard and West of Woodward.

*Most accounts say the riot began on the 23rd - though it lasted for several days, these maps appear to show the early stages. Therefore the date on the map (the 25th) may be inaccurate.

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

This map appeared in my inbox a while back and now I can't seem to find any reference to it online.

If you put a message in a bottle, who will find it? The map is credited to the Weather Bureau of the USDA and shows "bottle paper courses" from 1892 and 1893. The legend is cut off but I think that the blue lines are from 1892 and the red from 1893. Either the weather bureau actually placed bottles and then retrieved them or this is just some theoretical map based on currents.

Almost all of the bottles travel eastward, with the flow of the St Lawrence Seaway. However the ones placed near shore in the Toronto area get caught in a counterflow that takes them to the west before heading south and then back to the east.

If anyone has additional information about this unusual map I'd love to know more.

Created by Anna Vetter of Esri Switzerland, the map uses minimal and well separated details so the user can feel their way around the country without being confused with too much conflicting information. More good pictures from Twitter can be seen here,

This is remarkable. A 350-page map of Switzerland for the visually impaired. The whole country represented in textures, geometries, braille. pic.twitter.com/uMsB0I9YtO